Smithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Q — Restaurant in Morehead City

I've been meaning to email the owner of this restaurant for almost a month now. Since I'm sitting here looking at Google maps, I might as well just write a review. Smithfields is my favorite place to stop and grab a bite to eat when we visit Atlantic Beach. It's unusual but this year we stopped in twice, our first night there and our last night there. The last night was to grab some take out for everyone else back home here in PA who could not make the trip.

Both times we had amazing service. But, our last night there, getting ready for our trip home, the service was AMAZING. The person who I believe was a manager was extremely helpful, we were picking up a few pints of BBQ to take home and a couple of bags of hush puppies, he make sure everything sat correctly in the bag and even put in some extra "stuffing" to make sure nothing fell over.

The rest of the staff was extremely polite and took care of me and my family like we were old friends.

Lets talk about the Fried chicken for a moment though... I thoroughly enjoy me some Smithfield's BBQ, but my god was that chicken delicious. Super crispy, the meat was perfectly moist. It was cooked to perfection.

Again I want to say thank you to the staff who were there on the night of July 20th. You were all amazing and I thank...

Mixed review. Started with my senior father ordering two $6/ea BBQ sandwiches and then asking for a cup of ice. He was charged $1.60 for the cup of ice. Dad (and I) were pretty bothered, so he refused the cup and had it removed. But really, $12 of food and you can't throw in a cup of ice for a senior? I said something like that and that the manager, while walking away grumbled to another employee, "they should have ordered the meal then." Well, we don't know that! Maybe you could have explained the options to us. We're not experts when it comes to your little establishment (and they weren't busy). Someone else who saw what happened privately complained to us that they wanted to charge their (senior) wife for a refill. How dumb to count every nickel ahead of customer satisfaction. I just don't want to come back to a place that wants to nickel-n-dime you. Shortsighted on the manager's part. I don't care for their pulled pork at all, but dad likes it. I did have a fried chicken platter and that was tasty. I will say the employee who received the boss's snarky comeback did make up for some of the unnecessary dissatisfaction by bringing us everything we needed and carting our trash and getting a to-go bag, all w/o us...

Wife's fried chicken was very good, but the pulled pork was mediocre and served cold. Had to go to the counter to ask for ketchup and sauce and was ignored by the manager at the register for about two minutes while she played on her cell phone. When she finally acknowledged me, her response to my request was to tell the server when they brought the food to the table which was kind of difficult considering the food had been on the table for almost 10 minutes while they tried multiple times to take my payment.

First, the payment wouldn't go through and they rebooted their system. After way too long, it started up and we attempted payment again; still no luck. Finally after an excessive wait, I'm informed their system is experiencing problems with American Express payments.

Lastly, with the insane measures required by North Carolina to "combat" Covid-19 and not allowing patrons in the restaurant without masks, it's aggravating to see the manager running around operating the cash register and serving food with her mask down around her chin exposing both her nose and mouth.

I may give the chain another opportunity at some point in the future, but not time soon and definitely not at...